Three of six on the Samuel Johnson 2014 shortlist …Marion Coutts, Greg Grandin and Caroline Moorehead

The story of how villagers in France’s Massif Central mountains saved thousands of people from concentration camps during the Nazi occupation is competing with an account of how slaves on board a 19th-century ship rose up and slaughtered most of the crew for the UK’s top award for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson prize.

Unusually, two memoirs also make the shortlist. A memoir has never won the Samuel Johnson to date, but this year Helen Macdonald’s H is For Hawk, the tale of how she trained a goshawk – “birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail” – while mourning the death of her father, and Marion Coutts’ memoir about her husband’s death from a brain tumour, The Iceberg, have both been shortlisted.

“We were surprised by the amount of memoirs that made it onto the longlist,” said judge and historian Ruth Scurr. Six memoirs had been longlisted for the prize, with titles by John Carey, Henry Marsh, Ben Watt and Jonathan Meades all failing to make it into the judges’ final selection.

“I think memoir is a very exciting form – it can include history, biography, really be a hybrid of different non-fiction forms,” said Scurr. “It can be very experimental, and perhaps that’s something we were responding to.”

The final six is rounded out with John Campbell’s biography of politician Roy Jenkins, A Well-Rounded Life, and Alison Light’s Common People, which sees her explore her family’s history over two centuries. “Four books by women: two of them historical and two of them memoirs. Two books by men: a flawless biography and an extraordinarily enlightening study of slavery in the early 19th century,” said chair of judges and historian Claire Tomalin.

Tomalin added that the line-up contained “a consistently high quality of writing – clarity, colour, enthusiasm, vigour – and authors who were intellectually and emotionally engaged with their subjects”.

“It has been a very uplifting experience to read these books,” said Scurr. “Even the straight historical narrative books on the list are as compelling as the best novels.”

Tomalin and Scurr are joined on the judging panel by MP Alan Johnson, Financial Times books editor Lorien Kite and philosopher Ray Monk, with the judges set to announce their winner on 4 November. Previous Samuel Johnson winners include Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, which took the inaugural 1999 prize, and The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio, which won last year.

“We found it difficult to reach a shortlist as we had so many good books to choose from – we had some painful decisions to make. However, we all ended by feeling we had chosen the best shortlist possible,” said Tomalin. “Each of these books could be the winner of the prize, and we now face the almost impossible task of deciding on just one.”